Portrait of the Teacher as a 10-year-old Girl

Here's my sister and I on a family trip to New Mexico when I was ten years old and she was seven. I was a kind of strange little girl at that age, I suppose. I was sensitive and could be a bit intense. I loved to spend time outside, "exploring," as I called it. My parents' house now is in the middle of suburban sprawl, but back then it was on the edge of town, with cornfields and woods and a creek and a lake nearby. I used to spend a lot of time wandering about, splashing in the creek, catching frogs, and making up elaborate stories in my head. In the summer, I would come home completely covered in mud and my mother would hose me off in the driveway before she'd let me go into the house. I never got in trouble for getting dirty, though.

It seems remarkable how much freedom we had. I think nowadays parents are afraid to let their children roam as freely as they used to. Instead, they fill their schedules with organized activities: violin on Tuesday, soccer on Wednesday, gymnastics on Thursday, etc. Not that I think there's anything wrong with being busy and having interests as a kid. But there was something very valuable in having all that unrestricted time and space to fill with your own imagination.

I already liked to write at that age--mostly fantasy stories with unicorns and dragons and brave princesses and that kind of thing. I wrote a very long story about a mermaid and her dolphin friends that I worked on every day for about half a year. My dad read me The Lord of the Rings trilogy around that age, and I was heavily influenced by it.

As you might expect, I was teased a bit at school;) With the neighborhood kids, I was confident and possibly even bossy, but at school I was shy and "nerdy." I was smart and did well in my classes in general, although I was disorganized and messy and often got in trouble for losing assignments and that kind of thing. I did have a few close friends. My best friend, Bree, was also a kind of odd girl with a very well-developed imagination. We would ignore everyone else and concoct our own school-yard fairy tales. These days Bree has a daughter of her own and is a popular singer-songwriter in the local music scene. We are still very close; she is almost more of a family member than a friend.

I took things very much to heart at that age, and remember being completely overwrought by small cruelties and injustices. Nonetheless, when I look back on that time, I think that I was mostly happy. It seemed as though the world was big and wonderful, and just waiting for me to discover it, confident in the knowledge that my family was looking out for me should anything go awry.

3/4/08 Blog Topic for P1 Reading and Writing:
Write a portrait of yourself at age ten. Describe what you were like, what you did with your time, what you enjoyed, what you didn't, what school was like for you, etc.